From the neck up, though, the Punisher isn’t hyper-competent at all. Instead, he’s more like the classic noir dupe. Though he has a certain tactical animal cunning, his inner monologue is obsessively repetitive in a way that suggests borderline idiocy — where Batman’s traumatic backstory has, supposedly, made him smarter, the Punisher’s has left him, in Grant’s writing, a monomaniacal mental and emotional basket-case. The Punisher is, like most noir men, childishly easy to fool. He stumbles into traps, is bamboozled by a shady conglomerate called the Trust, and, inevitably, betrayed by a woman. His solve-it-by-shooting-it approach to every problem results in heaps of dead bodies, including that of one child. Said child’s death sends our hero into a self-pitying funk, complete with flashbacks and profound utterances (“It’s got to stop. The poor children.”) which, at least from my perspective, makes him appear more damaged, dangerous, unsympathetic, and unheroic than ever.

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Thanks for the link to Jim Behrle’s piece on the life of contemporary poets. In my experience, what he writes is also applicable to contemporary fiction writers. And if the titans of publishing get past the dabble stage with graphic novels and make the things mainstays of their output, you’ll see it become applicable to literary cartoonists as well. (Where the New York publishing world goes, academia follows.)

Remember: this is from someone who, unlike you, actually likes the stuff.